The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (22 page)

As the deep rumble of the subway passes overhead, the job seekers walk in and out, through the dozens of dusty single-room employment agencies, focusing on the whiteboards and wal s of Post-it notes that list the hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese-restaurant job openings that pass through the area each week. Three numbers identify a job to a restaurant worker: the monthly salary, the area code where the restaurant is located, and the number of hours by bus from New York City. To these Chinese restaurant workers, who can barely read English, the United States is not a series of towns or states. It is a col ection of area codes, almost al of which have dozens upon dozens of Chinese restaurants looking for help. Rent and cost of living are not usual y considered when relocating. The restaurant owners feed their workers, and it is standard to provide dorm-style housing.

A job could be summed up thus: $2,400, 440 near Cleveland, 10 hours.

The interviews, done by phone, are practical and blunt. These are jobs, not careers. Instead of

“What do you see yourself doing in five years?” it’s

“Can you leave tonight?”

If the parties agree, the job seeker then pays the agency, and the agency tel s him where to catch the bus that night. A network of Chinese bus companies has sprung up to shuttle these restaurant workers between Chinatown and the rest of the country. A typical bus advertisement: “Minnesota (612, 651, 952, 763) $150, Wisconsin (920, 715, 608, 414) $120.” The destinations are written by people familiar with American geography but unfamiliar with American spel ing: Detrot, Harford, Frankfort, Ann Arbol, Louisuil e, Evansiue, Coumbus, Beltimore, Wil mington, Teledo.

These Chinese-restaurant buses are not entirely unfamiliar to the American mainstream. The budget “Chinatown buses” that shuttle between New York and Boston and New York and Washington original y started out as routes for Chinese restaurant workers, before col ege students and the Lonely Planet crowd caught on. The buses exploded in popularity in the late 1990s, and the competition sparked violence between rival bus companies.

I have bussed through Indiana, Ohio, Chicago, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Seen from the window of a Chinese-restaurant bus, America looks entirely different: a large web of highways connecting little towns, modest cities, and sprawling suburbs, al of which have Chinese restaurants or wil have Chinese restaurants. In one overnight trip, I woke up from my position curled on the bus seat and gazed out into the early-morning light streaming through the smoggy haze. We had stopped at a gas station in Toledo, a transfer point. Half the people got off the bus and were shuttled off in waiting vans. They were being taken to other Ohio cities—

Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati—and from there to smal er suburbs. Like a river splitting into streams.

The police found their suspect.

A neighbor reported hearing screams from apartment 34A. Police rapped on the door. No one home. The emergency services unit kicked down the door, leaving boot marks on the paint. They overturned the furniture. They ransacked the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms. Drawers, cabinets, freezer—everything was searched.

They found nothing. Then the apartment’s inhabitant, Troy Smith, a twenty-one-year-old aspiring rapper, returned. He was shocked to find officers with flak jackets and automatic weapons standing in his apartment.

They noticed a suspicious red stain on his gray T-shirt.

What is that? The detectives asked him.

Barbecue sauce, he replied. It was three days old and from a Chinese restaurant.

Right.

Unfortunately for Troy, he had a five-year-old outstanding warrant; he’d failed to show up for a disorderly conduct summons when he was a teenager. That provided the opening the police needed.

They handcuffed him.

His mother, who had been alerted at work by a phone cal from a detective, returned home and was horrified to find her son in handcuffs. In front of gaping neighbors, the police dragged Troy and two friends of his to the police car and drove them to the precinct.

They gril ed him for hours.

“Where is the Chinese man and what did you do with him?” the detectives growled at Troy.

Troy insisted that he had no idea what they were talking about.

Then you won’t mind if we take your shirt in for testing, they said.

Go ahead, he told them. He signed a release for his gray T-shirt. It said, “I’m Troy Smith.

You can have my shirt for testing.”

Meanwhile one of his friends, a stout man with a goatee, was being questioned in another room.

Don’t go down with your friend with the socal ed barbecue sauce on his shirt, the detectives cajoled.

Troy’s friend insisted he had no idea what had happened to the Chinese deliveryman.

The test came back from the lab.

It was barbecue sauce.

Troy’s friend told me, after his release,

“Every black man who orders Chinese food is under suspicion.” Not only is there DWB, there’s also OWB

—Ordering While Black.

Within the dreariness of the Chinese restaurant worker’s life, there is one day that is different from al the others. For many it is the happiest and most romantic day of the year, ful of reunions and laughter and joy. It is not Valentine’s Day, with its plump cupids, or New Year’s Eve, with its furtive midnight kisses, or even Christmas, with its fresh mistletoe and family dinners.

For Chinese restaurant workers, romantic bliss culminates on Thanksgiving.

More weddings take place in Chinatown on that one single day than any other for one simple reason: it’s the only day that the nation’s Chinese restaurant

workers

can

consistently

get

off.

“Americans don’t eat Chinese food on Thanksgiving.

They eat turkey,” said Hong Yi Yuan, the owner of the Wedding Garden bridal shop and one of the main beneficiaries of the Thanksgiving boom.

On the fourth Thursday of each November, you can spot a steady stream of white gowns rustling down the streets of Chinatown, daintily shuffling past the herb shops, acupuncturists’ offices, and open seafood markets hawking live crabs and mussels.

The brides have glitter in their hair and fake lashes on their eyelids. If you look careful y, you can see that some women are wearing jeans underneath their dresses to keep warm in the chil y weather. Each year, tens of thousands of people, almost al Chinese restaurant workers or former workers, flood into Chinatown on Thanksgiving for hundreds of weddings. Banquet hal s are booked more than a year in advance, instead of just a month or two, as is standard for the rest of the year. The marital marathon of multiple simultaneous seatings starts before noon and stretches wel into the night.

The chances that Mr. Chen would be found alive seemed more and more remote. I left town for two days. Tuesday morning, as I was stepping off the plane in La Guardia Airport, my phone rang. It was my editor.

“They found him,” he announced.

I was confused. Found who? I asked.

“The Chinese deliveryman. They found him in the elevator.”

“Alive?”

“Yes, alive.”

He had been stuck for three days in an elevator in the building where he’d made his delivery.

My editor commanded: Get to the hospital.

*****UPDATE

04-05-05 0745

HOURS KC*****

AT

APPROXIMATELY

0605

HOURS

THE

ABOVE

LISTED

MISSING WAS

LOCATED

IN

AN ELEVATOR

40

WEST

MOSHOLU

PARKWAY

IN

THE

CONFINES OF

THE

52

PRECINCT. HE

WAS

REMOVED TO

MONTEFIORE

HOSPITAL

IN

STABLE

CONDITION.

Almost eighty-one hours after he had disappeared, Mr. Chen had reappeared, safe and sound—in the very building where he was last seen.

Crime reporters in New York City are a roving pack, a human spotlight that every day lands on another corner of the city. One of the nice things about this is that various reporters in the polyglot swarm wil usual y take turns translating, depending on the victim.

There is the Russian reporter from the
Daily News,
the Dominican-American from
Newsday,
and me, the Mandarin speaker. So that night, we tracked Chen back to the restaurant owner’s house in the Bronx, near where Chen himself lived. He recounted his story in Mandarin.

He said he had stepped into the elevator on the thirty-seventh floor on Friday night after making his delivery; the tip, from a retired police officer, had been modest. A man and a woman got into the elevator with him, but then got off at the thirty-fifth floor. As the elevator started moving again, it lurched and then plunged. He felt his body floating off the elevator floor and grabbed the handrail to anchor himself. As he fel to what he thought was certain death, the elevator suddenly slowed, decelerating until it stopped between the third and fourth floors. The car had dropped more than thirty stories.

He banged on the door and screamed, but no one heard him. The elevator, an express, was in a part of its shaft that had no doors between the first floor and the twentieth. He positioned himself in front of the camera. He pressed the emergency button and talked to the security guard. But he didn’t speak English. Al he could say was “No good! No good!”

Nevertheless, the security guards and the police insisted that they had not known of any of his efforts to contact the outside world.

Three days later, the fire department got a cal about a stuck express elevator in the building.

There seemed to be a drunk man in it, the security guard said. Using a key, the fireman guided the elevator from its perch to the bottom floor.

The men pried open the door.

There Chen stood, dehydrated but alert.

Improbable as it seems, despite al the dogs, divers, and detectives, no one had ever checked the express elevator. Even though there was a working video camera pointed in the elevator, no one had noticed Chen on the screen.

He had been invisible.

After his brush with the media spotlight, Ming Kuang Chen disappeared. He was afraid the immigration services would come after him, so he found work through the employment agencies in Chinatown.

There would be no more delivering for him. He took a kitchen job in another town.

Few stories that start with a Chinese deliveryman as the subject end happily. Several months later another deliveryman, Fa Hua Chen, was shot in the face after making a nine-dol ar delivery to a Bronx apartment building and was admitted to the hospital in critical condition. A few days later Chen died from the massive brain injury caused by the bul et. At the time of his death, his daughter, who was studying at the University of Leicester in England, had not seen him in a decade. His wife, who was back in Fujian, China, had not seen him for years either.

Bureaucratic red tape threatened to prevent them from attending his funeral in the United States. But John Liu, a Chinese-American New York City Council member from Queens who jumps into al discussions concerning Asian-Americans, lobbied hard to get expedited visas for them.

After the funeral, the mother and daughter went to see the Bronx apartment where the shooting had taken place. They stood there for several minutes. The wife put her hand over the bul et hole in the glass.

Among those at the funeral was Ming Kuang Chen. He slipped in and out of the city quietly. After al , he was only a bus ride away.

If visitors from another planet landed in the United States, they would be intrigued by the little transparent packets of brown-black liquid that accumulate in the crevices of households and workplaces across the country. Our visitor would notice that Americans treat the packets with a certain level of carelessness, tossing them aside. Then again, it could be surmised that the packages are precious, because of the way people hoard them for years upon years.

Because Americans are reluctant to throw them away, these visitors might think, the packets must be serving some greater purpose. Perhaps they are stored in preparation for the day when there is a great shortage of the brown-black liquid—in the same way that crude oil wil one day run dry. Or perhaps our guest would come to a different conclusion: given that the packets appear in a broad range of households—

old, young, black, white, urban, suburban, interior, coastal—the guest might hypothesize that the packets contain an antidote should the nation ever come under a massive biochemical attack.

The vast majority of those clear packets in the United States actual y come from a single source: a low-slung soy sauce factory in a quasi-industrial town in New Jersey cal ed Totowa, located about half an hour outside New York City. The factory is owned by a company cal ed Kari-Out, which supplies the things that Chinese restaurants give away: soy sauce packets, fortune cookies, trapezoidal white cartons, wooden chopsticks. I had been led to Kari-Out on the trail of the lucky Powerbal numbers.